Nabeel Gillani - I Am So Alive

Who I Am

...from the heart saying, shouting, "I am so damn Alive."
-Hafiz, WOW

My name is Nabeel Gillani and I'm currently a 21-year old senior at Brown University. I'm studying Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. I love thinking of new ways to enable people, particularly through innovative uses of technology.

The biggest influences in my life have been, and continue to be, my brother, mother, and father. And of course, the Big Man, but that goes without saying. They are my greatest sources of inspiration, optimism, and perspective, and for them I am eternally grateful.

The best moments in my life have been the ones that remind me of how truly alive I am -- that is, how fortunate I am to be able to think, act, and live in a way that is gratifying to me. It is my hope that I have the good fortune to always feel alive, and more importantly, share my "alive-ness" with, and grow from the "alive-ness" of, those around me.

Goals

It's a bit ironic to enumerate such intangible goals, but I thought it would be a good exercise in self-reflection :) The ordering implies no importance hierarchy.

Value those around me and what makes them special
Enable others
Grow my brain
Have a broad definition of what is "valuable"
Remember that I am a collage
Inspire young students
See the beauty in everything
Be okay with the fact that not everything will seem beautiful
Change realities
Never stop learning

Classes I've Enjoyed

Brown has given me a chance to take some amazing classes. Here are a few I've particularly enjoyed:

CS 0150: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming -- The class that started it all. I took this class my first semester at Brown and have been hooked on CS since. Andy was a great lecturer and has since turned into a great mentor. Can't put into words what this class has meant for my educational and personal development.

CS 2580: Solving Hard Problems with Combinatorial Optimization -- Great class on using mathematical programming, constraint programming, and local search to tackle the "exponential" nature of many real-life combinatorial problems. Examples of problems we solved include packing emergency response items into boxes in order to minimize the amount of empty box space; scheduling disaster crews to complete repair jobs in a hurricane-hit region in the shortest amount of time possible; and, of course, the classic Travelling Salesman Problem. Pascal, the professor, was also the man -- he has a great way of building intuition around difficult concepts and injecting humor into his lectures to make learning fun.

APMA 1690: Computational Probability and Statistics -- My first foray into the world of simulating probability and stats. We covered topics like pseudo-random number generation, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, dynamic programming on Gibbs distributions, and an intro to dimensionality reduction (PCA and ICA). Awesome professor, Matt Harrison, and great opportunity to see the real-world applications of probability and statistics.

EDUC 1200: History of American School Reform -- Introduction to various schools of thought in education and reform movements targeting improvement in learning / teaching. My first Education class at Brown ... Professor Luther Spoehr was amazingly articulate, engaging, and willing to challenge the status quo.

A shout out and thank you goes out to all of my family and friends that have provided me valuable guidance throughout the process of making this site. Thanks for the feedback - from catching the small grammatical errors to making sure I'm presenting myself in a way that reflects me. Special thanks to Amit for designing the header logo.

What excites me

As is the case for most people, it's impossible to put down everything that I think is cool. But here's a start.

Teaching

The opportunity to exchange knowledge with other people is one of the most beautiful parts of being alive. Below are some of the most meaningful opportunities to teach, motivate, and inspire that I've had.

Head Teaching Assistant, CS15, Intro to Object Oriented Programming -- My love affair with computer science began when I took this course way back in Fall 2008. I then proceed to TA the course in 2009 and Head TA the course in 2010. I was fortunate to work with a phenomenal TA staff both semesters, but the most fun part of the job was working with students new to computer science. I helped them debug their programs, learn about polymorphism and inheritance, and figure out their futures in CS (and Brown). I also had a chance to co-deliver a couple of lectures, one with my awesome fellow Head TAs Stephen Poletto and Kelly Newton, and the other with my Professor and mentor Andy van Dam. One of my defining opportunities at Brown :)

Learning Exchange CS Group -- Public middle school students in Providence, RI often struggle with learning math, often because they don't see its relevance in everyday life. A great friend of mine, Amit Jain, and I decided to try our hand at using Computer Science, Music, and Art to teach basic math concepts. We used Scratch as our teaching and programming platform for the Computer Science component. For more info on this, check out my projects page.

College / SAT Prep -- During the summer of 2010 while I was out in Seattle working for Microsoft, I ran a pretty chill 8-week SAT Prep course for about 8 students with sessions twice a week. It was really fun to deconstruct critical reading prompts and do math problems, particularly since we were such a small group. I've also had a chance to deliver college prep content to over 100 students and parents through several presentations, and to develop content for several hundred more. It's a lot of fun working with younger students to help them prep for college.

Learning

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Gandhi

It's amazing how much there is to learn in the world and how motivated people are to seek out new learning opportunities. Here are a few things I'm really interested in learning more about:

Optimization - How can we help people, businesses, NGOs, governments, and so on make better decisions even when their problems are exponentially difficult?

Machine Learning - How can we make computers find relationships between our innumerable data points to paint an interesting picture of the present and future?

Curriculum Development - How do we design curricula that make learning fun, relevant, and useful for the future of our country (and world)?

Interactive Computing - How can we make computers such a seamlessly integrated part of our lives so as to encourage their use as a decision-informing, educational resource?

People and Computers

My interest in CS started in the Fall of 2008 after I took CS15, but my love for technology is somewhat of a recent development. The biggest draw to computer science for me is its infinite potential, endowed not by some inherent quality of the field, but by what the users, and developers, of technology contribute. Thinking of ways to use technology to improve peoples' lives is something I've started to do, and hope to continue into my senior year and the rest of my life.

In my downtime during the summer of 2011 (this summer), I'm going to see what projects I can undertake to further develop this interest. Right now, I'm really interested in trying something like this out to see how we can make learning through programming even more exciting for young students. Check back periodically for updates :)

Basketball

Some people like to compare me to Michael Jordan. Just kidding. Here are some of my best moments on the court:

When I was 12 and played in a rec league, I averaged 4 points a game. During one game, I sunk a three pointer at the (halftime) buzzer. I had just bought a pair of the Air Jordan XVIIIs and was sure that the shoes were the reason I hit the 3. We proceeded to lose the game by 20 points.

During Fall 2010, I played Intramural basketball with a few friends. It was round 2 of the playoffs, and we were down by 8 points with 3 minutes left. I sunk two three pointers to bring us within 2 points with 18 seconds remaining. We got a rebound off of a miss from the opposing team, and I had the ball in my hands - behind the arc with 10 seconds left - when I launched a three-ball. The ball didn't even touch the rim and we lost the game. I then drowned my sorrows in a red Powerade.

As you can see, I've hardly attained legendary-baller status on the court, but basketball is something I have a ton of fun playing, particularly with good company. I frequent outdoor courts and pick-up games, so beware ...

Poetry

I'm a huge fan of Sufi poetry. The poems I've read always encourage deep self-reflection and appreciation for "being alive". I really like Rumi's work, but my favorite poet is probably Hafiz. I agree with my brother's characterization of the two: "Rumi's like the shy kid sitting in the back of the classroom while Hafiz is the class clown."

Here are a few of Hafiz's poems that I particularly enjoy:

Wow

Where does real poetry come from?
From the amorous sighs
In this moist dark when making love
With form or
Spirit.

Where does poetry live?

In the eye that says, "Wow wee,"
In the overpowering felt splendor
Every sane mind knows
When it realizes - our life dance
Is only for a few magic
Seconds,

From the heart saying,
Shouting,

"I am so damn
Alive."

My Brilliant Image

One day the sun admitted,

I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you
The infinite Incandescence

That has cast my brilliant image!

I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,

The Astonishing Light

Of your own Being!

Taking Pictures of the Sky

I'm a sucker for the neat patterns we often get to see in the sky. Here are a few of my favorites, all taken w/ my iPhone (3G and 4):

Here are a few projects I've worked on or am currently working on. I've kept the descriptions brief, so please get in touch if you'd like to hear more. As you'll see, many of these projects are products of collaborations with some of the most brilliant, passionate, and exciting people I've ever met.

Technical Work

The inner code monkey in me surfaces once in a while!

NBA Math Hoops | Stochastic Power Optimization | WALL-E Animation | Ray Tracer | Othello

Less Technical Work

Projects that I hold close to the less-down-and-dirty-coding part of my heart:)

Learning Exchange | College Prep Workshops | The Capital Good Fund | The Interfaith Exchange

NBA Math Hoops

(Picture pending site launch ...)

Board game to help students in 4th to 9th grade learn basic math. After being introduced to the organization, and one of the founders, Bill Daugherty, a few friends and I thought it would be cool to build something for students that would be playing the game as well as educators that would be facilitating gameplay in the classrooms. The site is scheduled to be launched when the boardgames are distributed to the schools in fall of 2011. Very promising is the fact that the pilot implementation of the boardgame saw pretty amazing results in terms of how students perform, and perceive, math.

This project is really exciting to me because it combines my interests in technology and education to answer the age-old question: Why is learning this math stuff important anyways?

Stochastic Power Optimization

Natural disasters are so difficult to recover from - because of both the emotional and infrastructural tolls they take. The damage of electricity networks is of particular concern, as power is a critical component of the recovery process.

The big questions that this research project tries to answer are: Given some set of possible disaster scenarios, 1. How much electricity can we restore to a damaged network, and 2. Which network items (buses, loads, generators, etc.) should we repair to restore the most electricity? The stochastic part comes into play when considering the fact that each disaster scenario has some probability of occurring. As is often the case with optimization, a big tradeoff in finding answers to the problem is between efficiency (runtime of the algorithm) and solution quality (amount of power restored).

In my first foray into optimization research, I've been trying to figure out how different electricity model approximations behave in restoring power flow in different disaster scenarios. If the models are accurate enough, maybe we can take an exact approach (using a MIP, for example) to solve a problem that would otherwise be poorly solved by a MIP under a different power model? The bigger picture is really exciting, as comparing the tradeoffs between runtime and solution quality could shape the way policy makers decide how to fix electrical networks damaged by disasters in the future.

A special shout out to my advisors / mentors and awesome teachers in this research - Professor Pascal van Hentenryck and his PhD student Carleton Coffrin - for taking me under their collectively "optimal" (pun intended) wing to help me learn about this project. They've been great in providing me opportunities to contribute to their work. We're all excited by what our current investigation could mean for addressing the problem of optimal power restoration in the future. Check back for updates on this work and how we plan to present results.

WALL-E Animation

This was our final project for CS123: Introduction to Computer Graphics. We implemented a simple particle emitter and used a mesh loader to read in WALL-E's body. WALL-E flies out from behind a planet and "dances" throughout space ... his motion is determined by piecewise Bezier curves. We also implemented bump mapping in GLSL, leveraging the power of the GPU.

Shout out to my project partner and great friend of mine, Alex Schultz, for making this a ton of fun. She even gave me a WALL-E costume to wear when we presented to the class :)

Ray

This was one of the last projects for my computer graphics course, CS123, taken during Fall 2010. The ray tracer uses a Phong illumination model and supports shadows, reflections, and texture-mapping. I also multi-threaded it for a nice performance boost. A great way to wrap up computer graphics and see the immense value of calculus and linear algebra in realistic rendering.

Othello

The game that started it all ... this was my final project for my introductory computer science course during the Fall of 2008. My virtual Othello was equipped with 2-player capabilities and a computer player with three levels of intelligence (implemented using the Minimax algorithm). Ahh so much fun to make / so addicting to play.

Learning Exchange

A great friend of mine, Amit Jain, and I started researching the educational landscape in Providence Public Schools during the winter of 2010. We found that at some middle schools, 80% of the students were either barely passing, or entirely failing, their math standardized tests. After talking with a number of after-school staff and members of the Swearer Center of Public Service at Brown, we decided to try out a program to show students how fun and useful math is by engaging them in Computer Science, Music, and Art projects.

The result is the Learning Exchange - an initiative aimed at sharing the excitement of what college students get to learn every day with inner-city youth at the middle school level that may otherwise have no exposure to these learning resources.

We recently wrapped up the 4-week pilot implementation of the Learning Exchange where we worked with approximately 14 students in three different groups: Computer Science, Music, and Art. The Computer Science group learned about math by making short animations and simple games via the visual programming interfaice Scratch. The Music group learned about the math behind sound processing as they made their own mashups and mixes in Garageband. The Art group learned about simple geometry and geometric transformations through a fun tesselation project.

We're currently in the process of distilling the results from the pilot and planning for an extended program starting in the Fall of 2011. We'll be finishing our website towards the end of the summer of 2011. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with further questions / comments / suggestions!

College Prep Workshops

As I mention at the bottom of my teaching dialog, under my interests, I've loved every chance, formal and informal, I've had to help younger students prepare for high school and college. Here are a few of the workshops I've either helped develop or delivered (or both) to students throughout the Northeastern U.S. through the Aga Khan Education Board:

College Application and Financial Aid - Goes over the process of filling out a college application and provides info on financial aid resources that students and parents can pursue for helping paying for college.
Roadmap to College - Advises students on how to discover, and pursue, their interests in high school, including how to share these interests with others.
College Appplication Essay - Discusses how students should approach writing their personal statements when applying to schools. Some of the content was inspired by material found on the Collegeboard website.

Should out to my friends and colleagues Faisal Karmali and Aamir Sundrani in making the planning of these workshops fun and rewarding.

If you'd like to hear more or use some of these resources, please feel free to contact me.

The Capital Good Fund

I came to Brown in the Fall of 2008 with an idealistic hope of changing the world, broadly defined. I was really interested in microfinance at the time, and upon coming to Brown, found myself with three other students interested in starting a Providence, RI-based microfinance organization. We wrote our business plan in December 2008, incorporated as a state non-profit in January 2009, and the result was the Capital Good Fund!

The Capital Good Fund (CGF) is a microfinance organization that offers people loans to start their own businesses, become U.S. citizens, buy laptops to integrate with the knowledge economy, and to "greenify" their homes to save money on energy and help the environment. I'm no longer involved with the day to day of CGF's acitivities, but am a member of the newly formed (May 2011) Alumni Advisory Board, an informal body that provides an outside perspective to help CGF run more efficiently.

Helping to start CGF was an awesome opportunity to have as a freshman in college. I've since carried the relationship-building, organizational skills gained from this experience into many of the other opportunities I've had over the past few years.

The Interfaith Exchange

I have had the good fortune of becoming great friends with Jonah Fisher, Anita Mathews, and Alyna Khan over my four years at Brown. Interestingly enough, our friendship has flourished despite our religious differences. Through our numerous 3am discussions on life, religion, and our futures, we've found that a major force binding us together is our shared commitment to service.

The Interfaith Exchange is an outgrowth of these conversations and Jonah's vision to extend them to younger students in Rhode Island. The goal of the program is to bring together high-school youth of varying faith backgrounds together to learn from one another about each other's religions, and in the process, collaborate to carry out service work in the Providence community. We've been lucky to work closely with the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless to engage in canvassing projects and outreach work impacting homeless youth, as well as with English for Action to help teach English to Spanish-speakers.

This project has been truly rewarding. I am constantly reminded of how passionate, dedicated, and visionary my friends are, not to mention how bright and motivated high-school students can be. Helping, with people I admire, to create an environment that encourages friendships across religious divides through shared service brings together so much of what I value as a human being, and continues to invigorate me.

Welcome!